American Thinker Needs to Start Thinking

April 24, 2014

Heidi Beirich

Today, American Thinker, a not so thoughtful far-right online publication that likes to publish anti-LGBT folks like Concerned Women For America’s Janice Shaw Crouse and World Congress of Families spokesman Don Feder, really outdid itself. It devoted an ungodly amount of words to a fawning profile of Jared Taylor, one of the most prominent white nationalists in America.

What could they possibly be American thinking over there? Taylor is a guy who publishes a racist newsletter, American Renaissance, which argues ad nauseam that people of color are lesser beings than white folks. His biannual conferences are filled with major white supremacists, Klan lawyers and their ilk. At one point, there was even a dispute among Taylor’s followers on the “Jewish Question,” if you can believe something that ridiculous.

American Thinker doesn’t start its puff piece with any mention of those issues. No, sir. Here’s their first line about Taylor, “Good manners are infectious.” Seriously?

Well, let’s just take a look at some of the “good-mannered” things Taylor has written. There’s this: “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”

And now let’s kick the good manners up a notch. Here’s Taylor on Hurricane Katrina: “Our rulers and media executives will try to turn the story of Hurricane Katrina into yet another morality tale of downtrodden blacks and heartless whites... . [But m]any whites will realize — some for the first time — that we have Africa in our midst, that utterly alien Africa of road-side corpses, cruelty, and anarchy that they thought could never wash up on our shores.”

For American Thinker, Taylor isn’t a rabid racist who tries to gussy up his hate with big words. Rather, he is a guy who “like[s] ideas,” has “good manners,” and who wishes his “commenters [meaning white supremacists] were better behaved.” Sure, American Thinker points out that there is anti-Semitism and racism associated with Taylor’s group, but even so, the article’s author, Jeff Lipkes, wonders if racist beliefs – i.e. white nationalism – can “be the basis for a political movement.”

Maybe if they put their thinking caps on at American Thinker, they’ll come up with the right answer to that question. But in case they can’t, here’s the answer: no.